In this brilliant op-ed today, Wall Street Journal ($) editorial page editor Paul Gigot throws down the gauntlet and challenges the Republican Party to elevate substance over form and show that the party can lead America. In a stinging rebuke of the party’s leadership over the past generation, Mr. Gigot lays it on the line for the Republicans:

Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government.
They ended poverty for the elderly with cross-generational entitlement programs, broke Jim Crow’s hold in the South with civil-rights laws, built the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that bedevil American business every day, turned our courts into quasi-legislative bodies, and planted the seeds of government-run health care that continue to grow today. As the party of government, they built institutions and processes that have consistently expanded its scope.
What, in the decade since they’ve retaken the House, have Republicans done that is consequential in the same way? If the GOP majorities vanished tomorrow, what couldn’t Democrats easily repeal? I’ve asked the latter question of numerous Republicans in recent days, and the only confident answer I get is “welfare reform.” By requiring in 1996 that the poor enter the world of work, Republicans stopped the development of a permanent American underclass. Yet despite that historic success, it is striking that they still haven’t had the nerve or clout to pass an extension of even that reform through the Senate. . .
In fact, it is depressing to consider how much of what Republicans wanted to do under a Democratic president in the ’90s they have abandoned now that they control both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. The regulatory reform requiring “cost-benefit” analysis that came within a vote of passing the Senate in 1995 has never returned. The excellent Medicaid reform vetoed by Bill Clinton has also gone nowhere, despite pleas from many governors to revive it. The Freedom to Farm Act was gutted.
Even the congressional budget process that Democrats designed to make spending easier remains entirely unchanged. Fourteen years ago, Congressman Chris Cox was able to win upward of 180 votes for such budget changes; last year he got 88, and he had to buck the rest of the GOP leadership to get even those.
Some of this can be blamed, first, on having a Democrat in the White House, and later having only small majorities on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. But not anymore. After November’s victory, Republicans don’t have any more excuses.

Read the entire piece. Mr. Gigot’s point is a variation on the theme that Milton Friedman touched on awhile back:

To summarize: After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently); we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion.

With a Republican president and solid majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republicans no longer have any excuses for failing to address America’s pressing problems in such areas as health care finance, tax policy, and intelligence reform, to name just three.
The Republicans have exploited the Democratic Party’s obsolescence in these areas to seize the reins of leadership. Now, it is time for the Republicans to lead or risk, as Mr. Gigot puts it, becoming “as evanescent as the Whigs.”